Happiness

The Obama transition team is asking you to help create a new health care policy. Really. This may be more important than it sounds. The key dividing lines over how to fix our country's broken health care system are becoming
clear.

In Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, Greg Mortenson, and journalist David Oliver Relin, take you on a journey that begins with a climber’s failed attempt to scale Pakistan’s K2 and follows with his repaying a poor Pakistani village that nursed him back to health by building them a school.

What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being, to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment.

Recent research has shown that our brains are made to support caring, cooperation, and service. David Korten says there is evidence that we can learn to get along across the red-blue divide—after all, we want most of the same things. As a bonus, we'll be healthier and happier if we do.

How happy are we really? Have the things we
thought would make us happy done so? This issue of YES!
explores different ways to find happiness: meditate, de-stress
the holidays, restore the earth, embrace the bad with the good,
simplify, and downsize. What makes you happy?

This resource guide highlights steps you can
take to be happier yourself and to support a healthier
society—by building stronger communities, creating joyful and
purposeful activities for yourself and others, practicing
mindfulness, finding healing, learning to live more simply, and
building a society that prioritizes happiness over accumulation
of wealth.

Frances Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet had sold 3 million copies. She co-founded organizations to fight hunger and bolster democracy. Along with her daughter, Anna, she traveled the world to gather stories for Hope’s Edge. Yet, like many of us, she experienced a time when her world crumbled…